


jet black mirror

by DragonNinjaAri



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-11
Updated: 2012-04-11
Packaged: 2017-11-03 10:54:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/380619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DragonNinjaAri/pseuds/DragonNinjaAri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What's it like to be an angel? Anna's thoughts, introspection, a fluid character study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	jet black mirror

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written September 10th, 2011, for the All the Women Fandom Hates Lovefest.

She knows Dean wants to ask it.

_What was it like being an angel?_

In those words, he wants to ask it. But it’s an impossible question, to ask or to answer. How could he explain what it’s like to breathe or to move or to wake up and feel the sun on his skin with it making any sort of sense?

How can he explain what it’s like to feel, unrestrained and free, not live being forced into a wax statue?

Because of the impossibility of the answer, Dean doesn’t ask and Anna doesn’t try to explain; all she can do is close her eyes and think, and remember, and know with a sharp pain that this impossibility is why she will never be able to speak with Castiel and make him understand.

Her subordinate. Her brother. Her  _friend_. Always so inquisitive and yet so dutiful, loving God more than any of them, Anna will frankly admit. It’s also impossible to explain to a human how time works for angels, because the passage of time is a very human invention. Regardless, believe her when she assures that Castiel always felt very much younger than her. Not just because she was his superior, but because it felt  _right_. It still does, especially when he’s in that vessel, those eyes a window into his ever-running mind, a mind that she at one time thought could have thought like her own.

 _Come with me,_  she recalls her pleading. Already a human action.  _Castiel, come with me. It’s beautiful down there. You’d love it._

But he recoils, rejects her, unable to comprehend her needs and desires, her exhaustion for this world, her desperate hope to see what it all means and the inevitable silence to all her questions. God will not speak with her. He will not speak with any of them. Heaven is not the place it once was and so many cannot see that, blinded by their obedience and their hardwired minds,  _yes, we must not give in to these quiet urges, we do not even feel._  But they do feel, because if they didn’t how can Anna want so bad, how can she look down on that planet with so much warmth and so much envy at the same time, how can she long for someone to hold her in their arms as she watches a mother cradle a child or brother embrace a sister or a pair of lovers on a midnight walk?

None of the angels can give her that. Her Father cannot give her that. Her brothers and sisters can never give her that. Not even Castiel, the one who at times seems to possess the same desires she does.

_Come with me._

It is so much easier to talk to Castiel in this vessel, she will reflect later, after she has turned her back on another life, after she has abandoned everything she’s ever wanted to go back to this sad existence. The hidden veiled confusion and yearning to understand that she so keenly picked up on all those years ago shines through his eyes, especially now, especially now that he has tasted human attachment and need and seen love and family.

She can, looking back, see the hesitance when he rejects her.

 _Fine. Goodbye, Castiel._  And as she stares at him, betrayed and pained, a mix of celestial and human thoughts, back and forth between her  _subordinate_ and her  _baby brother_ , desperate to know why he could do this to her-- send her back to that place and destroy all that’s left of Anna Milton, this beautiful self that has lived in her since the early days of creation-- she wonders.

She wonders if he can see the need to be embraced and held and loved, to have a family that can never be.


End file.
